The Well of Lost Plots – Jasper Fforde
Yep, you guessed it, this is the 3rd in the Thursday Next series of novels… Here we discover a little more about the life of the inhabitants of the literary world. Previously, we read a lot about the main characters who hog the limelight normally. Now, we get to discover a little about the lives of background characters, those who don’t play a main role in the novel, but without whom, the story would be very empty, with no background detail. Generics are necessarily blank by nature, and are very easy to influence, so Thursday needs to be careful with her interaction with them. The title of this book refers to what happens to books that never make into the public domain – eventually they are broken down and recycled into new books.
The other main storyline in this book is the introduction of a new book system. Although not unprecedented, the technology and restraints possible with ‘UltraWord’ have serious consequences on the average person’s enjoyment of a book. The new features on UltraWord have quite a few parallels with what is happening in our real world – things such as hyperlinking are obviously a good feature, however DRM (Digital Rights Management) appears, and the idea of robots churning out new novels, with no real imagination used could possibly apply to a lot of recent generic Hollywood output.
OK, enough of the politics, if you’ve read the first two books in this series, I’d of course recommend buying this book. If you’ve not yet come across the Thursday Next series, go back and read the earlier reviews, and decide whether this is your cup of tea or not.